- I am living in Paris, France. I have an AverMedia Volar Black HD USB tuner. My channels.conf is set up properly : everything plays fine with vlc. Mplayer works for all SD channels, and one HD channel (ARTE). The three other channels (TF1, M6, F2) are very bad : slow playback, lots of bad blocks, freezes. The main differences with the working HD channel ARTE are : separate multiplex, VBR instead of CBR, DD+ (E-AC3) sound instead of MP2 sound.

- I am under debian unstable on AMD64, kernel 2.6.29, up to date. The mplayer package provides a mplayer version : dev-SVN-r29417. I also tried to compile the latest mplayer source image, with same results. I have tried various -vo : xv,x11,vdpau. I have tried vc: ffh264,ffh264vdpau. All with same results.

- I have tried to dump the stream to a ts file. The file plays not too bad with mplayer, but slow (about 1/2) and jerky, while the CPU is not overloaded (25%, ie half of a single core). The file plays smoothly with VLC. Using -fps 50 does not accelerate or improve the playback. You may download the ts file at : http://www.galinette.org/test.ts (29MB)